Re: MANY windows for SAME folder opened

[Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On Tue, 2011-05-03 at 11:01 +0200, Alexander Skwar wrote:
> Hello.
> 
> I'm using Gnome 3 on ArchLinux. Browsing my folders, I noticed, that
> now Nautilus seems to open a new window every time, I open a folder;
> even then, when a window already exists. After a short time, the number
> of open windows becomes rather large, eg.:
> 
>   http://imgur.com/XVdwQ
> 
> What I did there, I opened the "! Unsortiert !" folder and navigated to
> subfolders and also back from these subfolders into the "! Unsortiert !"
> folder. Every time I went back to "! Unsortiert !", a NEW window got
> opened.
> 
> That's not good.
> 
> I liked the Gnome 2.x behaviour better.
> 
> I *DO* want to get a new window for every folder - but, please, only
> *ONE* window for *ONE* folder!
> 
> What can be done? Or is that now the way it's supposed to be?

The spatial mode (which behaves like that) was removed from nautilus, as
it doesn't fit very well with the way gnome 3 works (no desktop, the shell
will be handing files more, etc). However, the old "spatial" preference 
was kept, but it now has a much more trivial implementation, a pure "open
each new folder in a new window". 

This could be made somewhat more complex by looking for already opened 
windows for the folder and showing them instead. However, this will still
not be spatial behaviour as its easy to get several windows showing the
same location. Also in some situations it might not be what you want,
maybe the other window showing the folder is visible in some other
workspace related to a different activity than the current activity,
so going to that workspace and activating that window is not what you'd
want.

I'm generally not sure what the exact behaviour people are expecting from 
the new "open each folder in new window" mode (or how useful it is), so
I'm not sure what the right thing to do here is. What does e.g. explorer
do in this mode?